The Technology

Transmission with Zero Losses to Resistance

High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) wire transmits electricity with zero losses to resistance. HTS transmission cables can move huge amounts of power in small cables over very long distances — even across oceans — with no losses. By contrast, the most advanced conventional cable loses about 6% every 1,000 kilometers. In order to maintain its superconductivity, HTS cable must remain at or below the temperature of liquid nitrogen (77 Kelvin). So HTS cables are kept under a constant flow of liquid nitrogen, inside a vacuum-insulated pipe (or “cryostat”). Keeping that liquid nitrogen pumping and cooling requires 1% of the electricity transmitted in an HTS cable on the 10,000 kilometer stretch crossing an ocean and connecting continents. Conventional cable would lose more than 50% of the electricity transmitted to resistance from California to Japan or New York to Paris. In the past decade, HTS transmission technology emerged from corporate, university, and national labs, to prove itself in High Voltage Direct Current (HTS-HVDC) demonstration projects. HTS-HVDC transmission holds the promise of creating a global electric grid with no losses. Wattershed patented that promise, and intends to make good on it.